Among the participating organizations at the rally was the Non-Status Refugees Action Committee (CASS), which has played a prominent role in the ongoing protests. While welcoming the decision, which is part of an agreement between the government in Ottawa and the Quebec provincial government in Quebec City, CASS spokes-people have also pointed out its limitations. The fight would not end with this partial success, marchers on November 9 told the Militant. "We will continue our struggle to get justice for all the Algerians who don’t have legal status," said Mohamed Cherfi.

The refugees and their supporters launched the campaign following the decision seven months earlier by Denis Coderre, Canada’s Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, to end an April 1997 moratorium on the deportation of those Algerians not recognized by the government as refugees. The moratorium, which was similar to ones applying to immigrants from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda, had protected the Algerian citizens from summary eviction from the country.

The immigrants originally sought asylum in Canada from the civil war that has ravaged their country since the beginning of the 1990s. The Canadian government refused the majority of their applications for refugee status. At the same time it established the moratorium on the deportations of those who had exhausted all appeals procedures.

Ottawa justified its lifting of this protection by saying that the situation in Algeria had improved. The decision followed by a few days a trip to Algeria by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to negotiate commercial agreements between the two countries.

Since that time the refugees have organized, rain or shine, weekly vigils in front of the Canadian Immigration office in Montreal, held several press conferences and demonstrations, and taken the opportunity to speak wherever they were invited.  
 
Campaign wins backing
Speakers at the November 9 rally included representatives from the Montreal Central Council of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, the Teachers’ National Federation of the CSN, the Quebec Women’s Federation, among other organizations. Supporters of the refugees have also collected thousands of signatures on a petition opposing the deportations and the lifting of the moratorium, and demanding that official refugee status be granted.

On October 20, two of the Algerian refugees, Yahout Seddiki and Mourad Bourouisa, responded to an order to present themselves at the airport for deportation by seeking refuge in a church in the majority Black neighborhood of Little Burgundy. On top of their deportation order, ministry officials had declared that they would hold the couple’s Canadian-born son in the country if they were unable to obtain the necessary documents from the Algerian government authorizing him to travel with his parents.

Seddiki and Bourouisa’s action, which was covered by the media across Canada, helped to lay bare the human consequences of the Canadian government’s immigration policies.

Amid the public debate sparked by their protest, the Quebec government proposed to the federal government the procedure to "resolve" the situation of the Algerian refugees--a proposal that Coderre accepted.

According to immigrant rights attorney Noël St.Pierre,the suspension of ongoing deportation procedures is the first of three aspects to the agreement. In the second, Ottawa will forward to the Quebec authorities all immigration applications made on so-called "humanitarian" grounds by Algerian refugees whose demand for asylum had been rejected by the federal government. Thirdly, the Quebec government has stated that it will give these applications "positive and accelerated" consideration.

Aside from the fact that the agreement applies only to refugees inside Quebec, CASS spokespeople have also demanded that it cover 32 refugees whom the Canadian government admits to having forced to leave the country between April 5 and October 30.

They also explain that the evaluation by Quebec of the immigration applications will be done case by case. If Quebec applies its usual immigration criteria the result, they say, will be the rejection of many. One month after the announcement of the agreement, the Quebec government has not yet announced its selection criteria. Finally, say the refugees, the agreement does not affect Algerians who arrive in Canada after April 5.

The initiative by the Quebec government was based on its power to select immigrants who wish to settle in the province. This was won as a result of the struggles by the French-speaking Quebecois against their national oppression during the 1960s and ‘70s. At that time Quebec fighters demanded greater provincial control of immigration in order to counter Ottawa’s control of the borders to discriminate against French-speaking immigrants.

The Quebec government has once before used its power to select immigrants in the framework of a struggle by refugees. In 1998 it intervened in the same way in the case of dozens of Chilean refugees threatened with deportation by Ottawa. Some of them went on a hunger strike for 38 days and occupied a Montreal church for several weeks to call attention to their situation.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Minister of Justice has made it known that he may soon decide on the deportation of two Basque activists held in prison in Montreal since June 6, 2001. The Spanish government has demanded their extradition.

Gorka Perea Salazar, 28, and Eduardo Plagado Perez, 30, were condemned in Spain to six and seven years in prison for arson. Since their arrival in Quebec in 1997 they have maintained that their confessions were made under torture. The Basque Prisoners Support Committee has campaigned since their arrest for their release and for the granting of political refugee status.

Sébastien Desautels is a sewing machine operator in Montreal and a member of the Young Socialists.  
 
 
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